Accurate platoon control of urban vehicles, based solely on monocular vision

Automated electric vehicles for public use constitute a promising very efficient and environment-friendly "urban transportation system". An additional functionality that could enhance this transportation service is vehicle platooning. In order to avoid inter-distance oscillations within the platoon, a global control strategy, supported by inter-vehicle communications, is investigated. Vehicle localization in an absolute frame is needed and is derived here from monocular vision. The vision data is however expressed in a virtual world, slightly distorted with respect to the actual metric one. It is shown that such a distortion can accurately be corrected by designing a nonlinear observer that relies on odometric data. A global decentralized control strategy, relying on nonlinear control techniques, can then be designed to achieve accurate vehicle platooning. Simulations and full-scale experiments demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach.